Cycling, Garmin, Strava, tutorials, tips & tricks.

Get Started

I’m Alan Thompson, and I created ScarletFire. I’m guessing you’re here because we share a tendency to want to combine two mutual interests – cycling and all the wonderful, crazy stuff you can do with digital technology these days.

As the site has grown, I appreciate that it’s probably confusing to arrive here and try to figure out where to start. So I wrote this page to try and help you!

You can just dive in to some popular categories here, or keep reading, it’s up to you.

Cycling has changed my life over the last few years. I only really got “into it” seriously in 2011-12, as I approached and then turned 40. Whenever I learned something that I thought would be valuable to others, I wrote a blog post or tutorial to share the knowledge, and some of them have become incredibly popular.

Where are you starting from?

There are well over 250 articles on the site, and it’s difficult to present all the content in a way that makes everything easy to find, and logical to browse. This page helps you to find a useful starting point.

Total beginners

If you’re new to cycling and have never used apps to track your rides, try some of these articles to read about why it’s worth starting.

Got a smartphone? Wondering which apps to use?

If you’ve already got a smartphone, it’s incredibly easy (and free) to start tracking your bike rides using any one of a huge range of apps. I’m an Android user, and so I wrote a couple of introductory guides

Already got a Garmin? Need some help with it?

First of all, congratulations on making the move up from smartphone apps! A great place to start is this summary post of essential Garmin Edge 800 top tips for newbies. I’ve written several other very popular articles and tutorials, some of which are suitable for beginners, and others involve a little more geek power.

The best maps to use on your Garmin 800/810

ScarletFire includes many posts about the various maps you can use on the higher end Garmin Edge GPS units. In addition to detailed instructions about how to install free open streetmap maps, there are many articles showing screenshot comparisons of different mapsets so that you can see the pro’s and cons of each. For what it’s worth, my personal choice is the City Navigator map .

Strava related articles

I couldn’t write this page without talking about Strava. A couple of years ago, one of my posts about third party API sites that utilise Strava data became very popular for a while and gained me a lot of exposure and new readers. Strava has become the benchmark of successful fitness apps, and many of the other big players are now trying to emulate their success, by coming up with their own variations of the concept of “segments”, the magic formula to Strava’s success.